Kafka vs RabbitMQ vs Amazon SQS: Picking the Right Message Broker
A developer's guide to choosing between Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, and Amazon SQS. Covers architecture differences, throughput benchmarks, delivery guarantees, message...
Real-world architecture breakdowns of how companies like Uber, Stripe, and WhatsApp handle millions of users. Each case study dissects the actual systems: load balancing strategies, database choices, caching layers, and the trade-offs engineers made under real constraints.
31 articles and counting
A developer's guide to choosing between Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, and Amazon SQS. Covers architecture differences, throughput benchmarks, delivery guarantees, message...
What is the circuit breaker pattern? Learn how it prevents cascading failures in microservices with closed, open, and half-open states....
What is the thundering herd problem? Learn how cache stampedes crash systems, 6 solutions used by Facebook, Twitter, and Netflix,...
What is consistent hashing and how does it work? Learn how consistent hashing distributes data across servers, handles scaling with...
Deep dive into Netflix video encoding pipeline architecture. Learn how Netflix uses microservices, parallel processing, VMAF quality metrics, and the...
Learn how OpenAI scales PostgreSQL to handle 800 million ChatGPT users. Deep dive into connection pooling with PgBouncer, read replicas,...
A practical system design cheat sheet covering scalability, load balancing, caching, database sharding, CAP theorem, and distributed systems patterns. Essential...
How does Google Docs let multiple people edit the same document at once? Learn the system design behind real-time collaboration,...
Deep dive into Meta's XFaaS serverless platform. Learn how they handle 11.5 million function calls per second with 66% CPU...
Complete breakdown of X's open source recommendation algorithm. Learn how the For You feed works, including the Grok-based transformer model,...
Learn how Snowflake IDs work, their 64-bit structure, and how to implement them in Java. Understand Discord's snowflake ID length,...
Complete guide to caching strategies and patterns. Learn cache-aside, read-through, write-through, write-behind patterns, Redis caching techniques, database caching strategies, and...
Learn the CQRS pattern with practical examples. Understand when to use Command Query Responsibility Segregation, see real implementation code, and...
Deep dive into Google Spanner architecture. Learn how Google Ads handles 4.8 billion users with a globally distributed SQL database....
Deep dive into message queues in system design. Learn when and why to use queues, popular queue technologies like RabbitMQ,...
Deep dive into Amazon S3 architecture. Learn how S3 achieves 11 nines durability, handles massive scale, and why understanding it...
Learn how modular monolith architecture combines the simplicity of monoliths with the organization of microservices. Understand module boundaries, communication patterns,...
What is SSE? Server-Sent Events is a web standard for real-time server-to-client streaming over HTTP. Learn about the EventSource API,...
Learn how Long Polling enables real-time communication using plain HTTP. Understand the implementation, trade-offs, and when to choose Long Polling...
How stock brokers deliver millions of real-time price updates per second using WebSockets, Kafka, and ticker plants. Complete system design...
Learn how to design and implement a dynamic rate limiter that adapts to system load, user behavior, and traffic patterns....
Deep dive into Shopify's system design and architecture. How they handle millions of merchants, billions in sales, and massive traffic...
Complete guide to how DNS works for developers. Learn DNS resolution step by step, caching layers, DNS record types (A,...
How ticket booking systems prevent double bookings, handle 50K concurrent users, and process payments. Inside BookMyShow and Ticketmaster architecture.
Deep dive into Meta's cache consistency architecture - how they handle billions of users with near-perfect cache consistency using TAO,...
Deep dive into Slack's system design and architecture - how they handle millions of users, billions of messages, and maintain...
How to design a distributed counter for high-traffic systems. Complete system design guide covering sharded counters, sharded counter architecture, local...
Learn how Stripe prevents double payments using idempotency keys. Complete guide to stripe idempotency with code examples using tok_visa, database...
Deep dive into Cloudflare's technical architecture - how 15 PostgreSQL clusters, ClickHouse, and Quicksilver work together to handle 55 million...
How does Uber find nearby drivers? Learn how Uber's system for finding you nearby drivers works at 1M+ requests per...
Learn how WhatsApp handles 100 billion messages daily with a tiny team. Deep dive into Erlang, the actor model, Mnesia...